Joshua Robbins. Praise Nothing (The University of Arkansas Press, 2013).
Despair, and its accomplice Acedia (the spiritual version of
ennui), have been part of literature since at least Chaucer’s disturbing
portrait of the Pardoner. Recent poetry knows these complex feelings best from
Berryman’s mantic and morose Henry, who makes a game of his despair and invites
the reader to play along. In Berryman’s dream songs, we are surprised to see
that rather than nullifying the poetic impulse, despair urges the poet toward
enumeration, that the poetic analog of Acedia is not silence but rather
catalog. There seems to be something about despair that drives one to ever
closer examination of what is, as if the fear of the void pushes a poet to
cling frantically to the variety, the astounding copiousness of the material
world. This same tendency to turn despair into catalog, into ontological enumeration
is apparent in Joshua Robbins’ debut volume, Praise Nothing.
Praise Nothing announces
its despair in its title and begins with a poem in the form of a list. The poet
names “the streetlights’ high murmur,” “the rattle of shopping carts,” “the
skirr of asphalt // worn to gravel” and on in a minutely observed and detailed
catalog of a decaying suburbia. The poem’s insistence that “nothing / need be
forgiven,” its essential nihilism expressed in lines like “whatever / your
thoughts of heaven / by now they’d be long // unutterable,” is in creative
tension with the abundance of the imagery. This tension animates the poems
throughout this book. I could pick examples from anywhere and begin cataloging
Robbins’ catalogs, but let the poem “Collateral” suffice as an example, as it
is very explicit on the matter. In the silence after listening to his neighbor
beat a stray dog with a two-by-four, the poem’s speaker tells us
it
was
as
if this world had never been
more
pure, that the rasped October
breeze
through the birch trees on our street
meant
nothing, saw nothing, could say
nothing.
There was only silence,
then
a clang of wood on concrete
and,
somewhere, the dead leaves stirring.
The creative tension between the urge toward nothingness and
the urge toward enumeration is evident in the brilliant line break between “as
if this world had never been” and “more pure,” a taking away and a giving.
Again as the poem ends, he creates silence, then fills it with the two-by-four
dropping, the leaves stirring. The book stays energized by never settling into
total negation nor simple abundance: neither second-rate Baudelaire nor
second-rate Whitman, neither Nine-Inch Nails nor Mary Oliver.
Thus, when I point to the thread of nihilism in Robbins’
book, the tendency toward negation, it should be understood that this nihilism
is tentative and contested, always at odds with the intense desire to recover
faith. Such is always the way with despair, which is, after all, not a form so
much of atheism (one could not imagine a despairing Richard Dawkins) as a form
of frustrated desire. Think of the Pardoner’s preoccupation with the language
of salvation or Berryman’s Henry always teetering on the verge of hymn (or
indeed of Berryman’s own last works, such as “Eleven Addresses to the Lord”). This
desire for belief is expressed in poems such as “When I Say Hymn,” in which the
speaker expresses clearly the will to believe in lines such as “the day after
the fire // we sang over the sanctuary’s / ashy smolder.” The image itself
carries the tension of faith and despair, of hymn and ash. We see this tension
also in “Heaven As Nothing but Distance,” in which the poet declares, “I could
not even begin to count / all the things I wished to believe in,” again linking
a faith deprived with a sense of the copiousness of the world.
In Praise Nothing Robbins
shares many characteristics with poets whom we may call, loosely, the best of
the “neo-confessional,” poets such as Matthew Zapruder or Matthew Dickman, born
in the 70’s or 80’s, writing about the vacuity of American life, drawing
frequently on popular culture and personal reminiscence: edgy and direct yet
also, at times, experimental. (Another good example, and well worth a read, is
Jeff Simpson, author of Vertical Hold).
Robbins’ religious sensibilities, however, add something unique to his work, a
reaching after eternity even as the poet seems to feel that his reach exceeds
his grasp.
